I've got a really interesting assignment coming up for my 3D Modeling and Animation class. We're getting into material creation, and we're supposed to create 5 teapots, and just have fun coming up with interesting things with the Material editor. The only restriction is we're not allowed to use "Ink and Brush" to do cel-shading. That restriction is actually going to be for all of our assignments since apparently a lot of people use cel-shading to hide any mistakes that they made to their model. I already have a couple interesting ideas, like a slightly-transparent teapot with a water texture (from Wind Waker, since it'll match my fish) and a goldfish model I made from an earlier assignment inside the teapot. I also want to try experimenting with the top/bottom material to see if I can do something like sand on top of rocks. There's also a program I found that's supposed to attempt to auto-generate bump-maps from textures, and I have a few textures I had made a while back before taking the class when I was spending a lot of time playing with SketchUp. So, I thought that I'd ask if anybody with any experience in 3DS Max knew of any particular interesting effects that I could try out for my assignment. Effects and combinations that a complete beginner probably wouldn't think of. I'd really like to see what kind of cool stuff can be put together.
